Posts by Doctor Syntax 42493 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"Not sure whether by Brits who want to invade again"
One of those downvotes was from someone who spent many years there during the IRA/UVF campaigns and has seen the consequences at close quarters. That's "seen" as in having helped dig up the occasional murder victim or help identify very badly burned remains (Google La Mon for details).
Some of us know very well what a land war is like in Ireland. It's not the land that gets hurt.
"For example, if you are running the IT infrastructure in a university, you'll probably have access to a lot of manpower (in the form of students and researchers)… in this case it's probable that your TCO won't be affected by the cost of Sysadmins"
In that case you might be paying for more Sysadmins to defend it all from the students and researchers.
Mine's an old white one with ferric chloride stains that won't come out.
Amend the the message to "You are about to send $NUMBER people each other's email addresses. Many of them won't want to have their address given away like this. Some of them will object very seriously and may sue your company. At the very least you will look stupid. You may get fired. Do you want to have your comany sued, look stupid and maybe lose your job?"
Yes.
' If I am paying for a certain amount I should be entitled to continue paying for that amount at the "contracted" rate.'
A couple of problems with that. First, if it's free then you're not paying and it's doubtful whether there's a contract at all. Secondly, remember the old saying: if it's free it's worth every penny you paid for it.
"We should remove it and replace it with a second elected house."
The Commons will never approve of that. As things stand they can claim a legitimacy over the Lords that being elected brings. They're not going to give that up.
For the rest of us the advantage of the HoL is that because its members don't have to depend on the party machines to keep their membership they can ignore party lines if they think those are wrong.
I think the HoL needs some ex officio members other than the bishops. Say the presidents or equivalent of the Royal Society and the chartered institutes, maybe a few University VCs etc. If they have several acknowledged experts in a field explain why a proposal is bollocks they'd have to listen (assuming Gove doesn't get booted upstairs, of course).
"our politicians had already signed us up to it without a democratic mandate."
Nevertheless we were then asked for a mandate to continue and gave it.
"The 1975 referendum did not affirm that the UK public wanted to give away their national sovereignty etc"
You know as well as I do that the nature of a referendum question is that it wraps all the individual negotiating points into a single question and:
"The same applies to every European treaty signed since that takes more power away from member countries and hands that power to the EEC/EU/United States of Europe."
I completely agree with you. I think every EEC/EU country should have held a referendum to enable its government to ratify all the succeeding countries. I also think the referenda should have required a substantive majority, say 2/3rds, to change the status quo, just as I think this recent referendum should have required it. Such a requirement would have caused the negotiators to have come up with much different treaties if they wanted to get them though. In fact we may still have had the EEC in place.
You should realise that my position isn't what you think it is. I think there's a great deal wrong with the EU but that walking away is just plain nuts on economic grounds. I don't think that the great economic opportunities that the leavers are hoping for are there.
If we try to retain the foreign investment that's here because of our EU membership we'll have to retain all the other aspects of the EU that you don't like but with one difference - we won't be part of the decision-making process so this much-vaunted regaining of "control" or "sovereignty" won't just be a chimera, it'll be the opposite of what you claim. In this respect the Leavers have scored a massive own goal.
The globalist option is going to involve trying to negotiate our own trade treaties with existing players. Again, our degree of control is severely limited. You have to ask what they're wanting and whether it's going to be to our advantage. The likes of India are going to be looking for even more off-shoring. As for the US - look at their recent "partnership" negotiations; they're clearly commercial colonisation acts intended to put US corporations in much the same situation as the East India Company once occupied in India. Any "deal" we get there is going to be a lot worse than what was being negotiated with the EU.
We've simply cut off our own economic nose to spite the EU's political face.
"This begs the question of why our politicians ever signed us up to Europe against the will of the people"
It clearly does.
'"Begging the question" is a form of logical fallacy in which a statement or claim is assumed to be true without evidence other than the statement or claim itself. When one begs the question, the initial assumption of a statement is treated as already proven without any logic to show why the statement is true in the first place.' ( http://begthequestion.info/ )
Your statement that joining was against the the will of the people falls foul of http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/june/6/newsid_2499000/2499297.stm
"From our previous exchanges I thought you would know by now I absolutely voted leave."
Indeed. Maybe you didn't read my last post on a previous exchange - what with one thing and another I got round to it pretty late. If you had you'd realise that I'm not an outstanding fan of the EU, it's just that I think the idea that we can just walk out to be an economic nonsense. At least we're not in the Euro.
"By the time we are out it will be another GE and the people can choose the direction of the country."
Our ability to choose the direction will be restricted. What if the choice at that point would have been to remain - as it might well be if all those businesses here for an EU base have started to migrate? That choice would be gone. If the choice is a trade treaty with the EU then it will be on the EU's terms. The choice of being an imperial power is long gone. The choice of being a major world power hasn't existed for the last 60 years, post Suez.
"Those of us who remember what the UK was like before we entered the EEC ...Deciding for ourselves the direction our country is to go in."
I certainly remember those times. A good many people who want to go back to them seem to think we were still a great imperial power. We weren't. Our ability to decide effectively was pretty well finished when Eden declined to show two fingers to the US in '56.
"Hopefully now we have a new PM she will actually lay out a plan and get on with it."
I take it you were a Leaver. Don't you have any suggestions as to what a good plan would be? Other than hoping that the existing incumbents would be able to think of something which, AFAICS must have been one of the Leavers' plans; the other being "magic happens".
"Similarly Privacy-Shield is not really there to protect privacy - it's there to try and provide some kind of control over our personal data."
No it isn't. It isn't even there to look as if they're trying to protect data. At best they're trying to look as if they're trying to protect data. And as we all know they don't even look as if they're trying to look as if they're trying to protect data.
HTH
"you know what I said about not everyone getting it ?"
When dealing with the DWP never attribute to craftiness that which can be attributed to stupidity. A former colleague in a project where we dealt with them summed them up: "not the sharpest knives in the box".
"QR code is unsafe, and like URL shorteners a great way to lead to malware."
AIUI this system reverses the normal QR situation. The customer, via the phone, presents the QR code to the store. The customer is not at risk of a malicious code and, if the till software is in any way sane, it's not going to interpret the code as a URL. If the code doesn't make sense within the requirements of the payment system it's just going to decline the transaction.
What's not clear in all this is how the system guards against fake codes. I take it there must be some dynamic element in generating the code.
"Hell, I'd even offer to pay it out of my pocket is I was given choice between Windows and Mac/Linux."
That's generous. But what would you pay out of your own pocket when one of your business's customers comes along and wants to know why you've put personal data about him on computers, maybe in the US, that you don't control and he wants to see you in court about it?
"Why is it not possible to have a single article that mentions microsoft or windows without some moron (or group of morons) telling us that they have either stopped or are planning to stop using it?"
Have you stopped to think why? Maybe you should start from considering the possibility that they're not morons and then carry on by asking yourself what it tells you about their experiences with Microsoft & Windows.
"And thus companies like M$, FarceBook, crApple and the Chocolate Factory get to squaf all their data to the authorities and sell it to the highest bidder without concern."
Frankly, I'm less bothered about those companies. You deal with them direct if at all and as you should know what they're up to you can make your choices accordingly. The real problem comes with dealing with a local company that then ships the data overseas, maybe unbeknown to you. A company like your employer which might use an on-line HR system, maybe. Or a company that uses an on-line CRM system. Or a bank that shares data with a credit reference bureau. Those are cases where you haven't much choice at all or no informed choice.
"right of access for Eu subjects to USA court"
That's not acceptable on practical grounds. The redress needs to be in the data subject's own jurisdiction against the entity that shipped the data into the clutches of the US. Each business will then have to think carefully about whether they wish to ship data there or insist on it being processed where they have effective control.
"I'm sure our nice new PM with her well-know concerns for data protection and individual privacy rights will swiftly negotiate a nice treaty with the US to allow them to take any UK data they like when they like and do whatever they want with it."
Not if she's any sense. UK service companies will want to do business with EU customers. Unfortunately that's a big if.
"Every five years or so"
I doubt it will take so long. I think we'll very quickly get to the state where the writ's issued the day after the current attempt comes into force, if not on the very day. At some point it will become clear that the only solution will be for the US to introduce proper privacy legislation (at which time selling double glazing and central heating in hell becomes profitable) or data has to stay in the jurisdiction at arm's length from any US corporation. Maybe European companies will supersede US ones in the market.
The smart US businesses will start restructuring there operations to do this before it becomes absolutely necessary.
"Disks are way too big these days"
So there's the basis for a defence strategy - copy on write. Then apply the sort of approach these guys are taking to detect file changes - if the file changes look OK surplus old copies can be quietly garbage collected.
However, I still think the best approach is one where user programs don't get direct access to the files, they request a server and there should then be a means for the server to verify the requesting program - cryptowhatnot doesn't get the ability to read and write your spreadsheet and it's not the recognised client to get the server to do that for it.
